News

Particle hunter to be a smashing 20 miles long

SCIENTISTS will this week announce plans to build the world’s biggest and most
expensive particle accelerator — stretching up to 20 miles.

The machine will surpass the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle
accelerator that has a circumference of 17 miles and was used in the hunt
for the Higgs boson, the particle that gives matter its mass and whose
discovery was announced last year.

The LHC’s successor, the International Linear Collider (ILC), will smash
subatomic particles together with such force that it could reveal evidence
for new forms of matter and extra dimensions of space. Some scientists are
calling it Einstein’s telescope, because it would show just why the
physicist’s equations work as they do.